Review
Islamophobia has become a dominant form of racist expression across the contemporary global North. Thinking Through Islamophobia provides an especially welcome, timely, and varied set of accounts about what the phenomenon covers, why the current upsurge, and how effectively to think about it.' --David Theo Goldberg, author of The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism
'Thinking Through Islamophobia is a rare endeavour of collective scholarship that is timely, prescient and seminal. Challenging us to develop Critical Muslim Studies in post-western epistemologies, it provides exemplary analyses of the imbricated formations of racism, Orientalism, secularism and post-colonialism largely silenced by contemporary social and political theory.' --Barnor Hesse, Northwestern University
Product Description
Islamophobia is a widely used but inconsistently defined term, hotly disputed and frequently disavowed. To its supporters, it captures a defining phenomenon of our times and is an important tool in highlighting the injustices Muslims face. Yet its effectiveness is weakened by the lack of an agreed meaning and relationship to racism and orientalism. To its detractors, Islamophobia is either a fundamentally flawed category or worse, a communitarian fig leaf, shielding "backward" social practices and totalitarian political ambitions. The figure of the Muslim forms the backdrop to these debates and, more generally, to the mobilizations and contestations of "moral panic" that follow.
Adopting a global perspective, this collection provides four distinct contexts for the problematization of Muslim identity and the deployment of Islamophobia. Drawing on diverse fields of disciplinary and geographical expertise, twenty six contributors address the question of Islamophobia in a series of interventions, ranging from large and sustained arguments to illustrations of particular themes in the following real-world contexts: "Muslimistan" (broadly within OIC member countries); states in which Muslims either form a minority or hold a subaltern socioeconomic position yet cannot be easily dismissed as recent arrivals (much like immigrants from India, Russia, China, and Thailand); lands in which Muslims are represented as newly arrived immigrants (such as Western plutocracies); and regions in which the Muslim presence is minimal or virtual, and the problematization of Muslim identity is vicarious.
